Various consumer products have associated expiration dates after which the product is no longer considered effective, or safe, for its intended use. For example, many foods have expiration dates after which the food is no longer considered fresh.
Expiration dates presuppose that a product has been maintained under assumed conditions, which may or may not be the conditions that the product is actually subjected to. In determining an expiration date to pre-print on a product, uncertainty as to how a product will be stored may warrant conservative estimates, especially when use of an expired product may have costly consequences. For example, a medicinal product might reasonably have a long shelf life, but shorter expiration estimates may be appropriate to avoid even a small risk that a patient will not receive a prescribed dosage of medicine.
Another example is ice cream. Ice cream typically has an expiration date one year from manufacture. However, if it is not kept at the required freezing temperature, then the shelf life of the ice cream is drastically reduced. Also, when the container is opened and air is introduced into the container, the environmental conditions change significantly in a manner not accounted for on the preprinted expiration date on the container. Similarly, containers of copier toner, postage meter ink, or cleaning solvents may have significantly altered shelf lives depending on the environmental conditions they experience.
The accuracy of an expiration date is dependent upon the integrity of the product packaging. If the seal on a container fails, the container wall is punctured, or the product is tampered with then the product may become contaminated or deteriorate. In the case of a carbonated beverage or fine wine a breach in the container seal ends the “storage” phase of the product life cycle and initiates the “consumption” phase of the product life cycle in which the expiration date is significantly shortened. The current expiration date system uses static information and does not base the information on the conditions within the container at hand.
Conventional product packaging does not offer dynamic adjustment to the expiration date in response to environmental conditions in a manner that provides credibility and accuracy to the expiration date.